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Thursday, March 31, 2016

Kenya's Flight From Theory

Gabriel Nderitu wants to fly. The 49 year
old amateur airplane builder from Othaya has become an annual fixture on our TV
screens as he tries out yet another of his contraptions that stubbornly won’t
get off the ground. By 2014, Gabriel had reportedly spent a million shillings on his frustrated passion. And though we can't help but admire his chutzpah
and determination, it is curious that over a century after the Wright brothers
flew at Kitty Hawk, Gabriel, and several others like him across Kenya, are not
soaring.

The answer probably has something to do
with Kenya's peculiar approach to learning. With a conference underway in Nairobi to discuss
the scrapping of the 8-4-4 system of education, there is a marked preference
for “practical” as opposed to “book” learning. Opening the conference, Deputy
President William Ruto railed against university classrooms that teach Vasco da
Gama but not how to fix a lamp. One radio station tweeted: “Kenyans propose
curriculum system that emphasizes on skills not theory & exams”.

"Theory" has become a dirty word. Yet it, or
rather the lack of it, is perhaps the reason why Gabriel and his friends are staying
grounded for now. It is also the reason why Kenyan dreams of economic and
political success have yet to take fight. This was well illustrated last week in
the reaction to an opinion piece by Dr David Ndii.

That the article made for uncomfortable
reading is an understatement. Dr Ndii’s proposal that Kenya consider
balkanising into ethnic statelets in the event of a post-election conflagration
triggered by a “sham” 2017 poll, had many frothing at the mouth and calling for
his arrest. It has also led to an earnest debate about what nationhood is and
why Kenya has seemingly failed to propagate a successful national narrative.

Many of the explanations put forward lay
the blame on ethnicity. “The tribe has eaten the nation,” Dr Ndii wrote. He Kenyan
elite, he argues, has preferred a tribal discourse and spurned several
opportunities to nurture a national one. He sees Kenyan tribes in an abusive
relationship with one another and proposes dissolution of the marriage as a
viable option. Other, while not going so far, still accept that the basic
problem is one of tribe versus nation.

However, this is lazy thinking and the frameworks
employed obscure rather than explain the true nature of our problems. For the
Kenyan people are not in an abusive marriage with each other. They are in an
abusive relationship with their governing elites. The underlying reality is one
of a state created by the British to extract resources from the local
population and feed them up to an elite few. This state, which preys on
wananchi for the benefit of wenyenchi has not been fundamentally reformed since
independence.

"Will the elite which has inherited
power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social
and economic changes or will they … become part of the Old Establishment?"
the future President, Mwai Kibaki, asked in 1964.

History has shown that they chose the
latter path. As noted by Professor Daniel Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, “elites
have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first
and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of
scarce resources.”

In using tribe as opposed to class to frame
their analysis, Dr Ndii and many of his detractors fall into this trap. They
fail to see that that the problem is not one of tribes robbing each other, but
of a ravenous elite stealing from everybody else and hyping ethnicity to cover
their tracks.

Far from wasting time, better theorising would
lead to better solutions and learning from history is critical to not repeating
past mistakes. Like Gabriel, if Kenya is to reach for the sky, it would do well
to spend at least as much time thinking through theories of how things work as
it does tinkering in the backyard.